Interview with Countertenor Scott Belluz

In March, countertenor Scott Belluz
starred in The Man Who Married Himself,
a production by Toronto Masque Theatre in their penultimate season, which the Crow’s
Nest website described thus: “Unwilling to marry a
woman, a man fashions a lover from his own left side. He's enraptured by her
perfect beauty—a mirror of his own—until he discovers that this new woman longs
for freedom and wildly desires another. South Asian and Baroque music and
performance traditions meet in a stunning new masque based on a traditional
Indian folk-tale. Powerful and timely, The
Man Who Married Himself is an allegory of the female and male warring
within as told by 2 dancers, 3 singers and 6 musicians.” The show was very
engaging, with lots of gestural and sensual stimuli, as well as unexpected
humour. As
someone in the talkback said, unlike most folk-tales,
which in general have a moral, the ending in this one is more fluid and
open-ended.

Scott was
good enough to spend some time answering my
questions about his part in this event. (To read my first interview with him,
please click here.)

VW: Why did you move to LA?

SB: I’m currently living out my dream of working in music
supervision/licensing for the TV and film industry in Los Angeles. I took
classes at UCLA to understand the legalities of music copyright, publishing and
licensing and ended up landing a job with a music licensing company called Lip
Sync. We represent a diverse roster of bands and solo artists whose music we
pitch for placement in TV shows, films and commercials. As a self-diagnosed
music junkie with catholic tastes, this job allows me to do what I love best:
discover amazing new artists and align them with opportunities that will get
their music heard. I'm really
enjoying pursuing this work alongside my singing career.

VW: Wow, you are versatile!

I think TMWMH hinges on themes
surrounding duality: LGBTQ identity comes to mind; also two-spirited Native
views re: gender; Janus facing both the past and future; our fascination with
amphisbaena (animals born with two faces) and with conjoined twins (I think the
earliest record is from 1100 AD in England); even our language around deceitful
people being “two-faced”: we are fascinated with the dual nature of humanity.
My view of The Prince was as Alex Samaras said in the post-show talkback: that
the newborn woman wasn’t really separate from him but still a part of him. How
did you approach the role of The Prince?

SB: I try to approach the rehearsal process with few
preconceptions regarding the character.
Gradually, during rehearsals, I make discoveries with the creative team
and in relation to my fellow cast members which shape the character. I’m not concerned with psychologizing the
character as part of my preparation; my focus is on learning the music and
text. While [composer] Juliet [Palmer]’s score took full advantage of my vocal
range, I wasn’t preoccupied with duality or whether I was using my baritone
chest voice vs. countertenor falsetto—for me it’s all MY voice, not two
different voices.

VW: Did your portrayal change as you
worked on the piece?

SB: It evolved. The
Prince often narrates his own story in the third person before jumping into the
first person. While it’s a common trope in Indian music dramas, it was my first
time encountering this device as a singing actor. The ambiguity of voice
imposed by this device within the densely metaphorical text was an interesting
challenge. Once I embraced the fluidity, it was liberating to move rapidly
between points of view. Acting, for me, is just playing situations (not
characters) and stringing together states of mind or being. My performance in
this piece was underlined by that philosophy. By the time the show opened,

I was more concerned with
showing universality than any specificity or minutiae which often defines a
character.

For me, The Prince
transcends duality in [librettist] Anna [Chatterton] and Juliet’s treatment of
the folk-tale, “The Prince Who Married His Own Left Side.” I began to think of
him as post-gender and post-sexual, which allowed me to credibly traverse the
story’s arc, and the wide vocal range as well!

VW: I think it’s also about
greed/desire/need for control in our sexual relationships and, more broadly, in
our lives; fashioning another to be an “improved” or desirable self/ partner:
like Dorian Gray’s desire to avoid aging, the creation of a perfect beauty in
Pygmalion, and the drunkenness of creating life in Frankenstein. Am I reading
too much into this, or did you note these rattling around in your mind when you
were moulding(!) your performance?

SB: Upon first reading the libretto, I was of course struck
by the sheer number of familiar thematic references it evoked: Adam’s rib meets
Pygmalion meets Narcissus. It’s difficult to say to what degree any
associations with these stories may have filtered subconsciously into my
performance. From the original folk-tale, Juliet and Anna fashioned something
truly unique, layered with with meaning and metaphor, and resonant for today.

VW: I sort of felt, looking
back on the other interview, that things haven’t changed as much as I’d thought
or hoped. Eight+ years ago, we talked about internet dating etc., and it’s
interesting how unsavoury aspects of love and marriage are present in TMWMH
too, but now there are more expansive applications if we consider how things
have changed, such as with Tinder and the mainstreaming of porn: there still
remains this sense of men being unsatisfied with real women (and women still
feeling like that, perhaps exacerbated by social media). We also talked about a
sense of discomfiture around gender issues and male/female ascriptions to the
countertenor voice. I thought it was interesting that someone else also brought
up social unease with the countertenor
voice because of it straddling (our ideas of) the two sexes.

SB: In regards to discomfiture around gender issues, I agree
that things have not changed as much as I would have hoped in the last eight
years. As a gay man who was bullied and
harassed in my youth because I played piano not baseball and worshipped figure
skaters not hockey players, I am deeply concerned by the number of people who
daily live with undue “minority stress” as members of any marginalized group.

It feels good to be making art
which is contributing to this discussion and perhaps encouraging the eventual
eradication of discrimination and inequality.

If the countertenor voice
challenges people to confront their unease and re-examine their notions of
gender, so be it.

VW: I love Indian food, aesthetics,
Bollywood and Bhangra, but my myth education never included any Indian stories.
What’s something interesting you learned about Indian culture?

SB: I learned that the traditional Dhoti pants worn as my
costume are still worn by men today in the villages of India. I never would
have imagined that 4.5 metres of unstitched fabric wrapped around the waist,
passed through the legs and tucked at the back could be so comfortable!

VW: Thanks so much for your time, Scott.
I was pleased to be going to TMWMH, but I wasn’t expecting to be as moved as I
was: this production was entirely charming and your performance was integral to
that.

What’s up next for you?

SB: Next is Unsuk Chin’s Cantatrix
Sopranica with Soundstreams Canada as part of this year’s 21C Music
Festival! See you there!